Part 17 (1/2)

But they were face to face with death, and hence the anachronism had been adopted, and they had fallen back on the custom of their fathers.

So three-and-twenty judges they had appointed, without usurers, or slave-dealers, or gamblers, or aged men or childless ones.

The judges had sat in session the same night, and their judgment had been unanimous. The lot of Jonah had fallen on Israel. He had sold himself to their masters and enemies, the Moors, against the hope and interest of his own people; he had driven some of the sons of his race and nation into exile in distant cities; he had brought others to the Kasbah, and yet others to death: he was a man at open enmity with G.o.d, and G.o.d had given him, as a mark of His displeasure, a child who was cursed with devils, a daughter who had been born blind and dumb and deaf, and was still without sight and speech.

Could the hand of G.o.d's anger be more plain if it were printed in fire upon the sky? Israel was the evil one for whose sin they suffered this devastating plague. The Lord was rebuking them for sparing him, even as He had rebuked Saul for sparing the king and cattle of the Amalekites.

Seventeen years and more he had been among them without being of them, never entering a synagogue, never observing a fast, never joining in a feast. Not until their judgment went out against him would G.o.d's anger be appeased. Let them cut him off from the children of his race, and the blessed rain would fall from heaven, and the thirsty earth would drink it, and the eggs of the locust would be destroyed. But let them put off any longer their rightful task and duty before G.o.d and before the people, and their evil time would soon come. Within eight-and-twenty days the eggs would be hatched, and within eight-and-forty other days the young locust would have wings. Before the end of those seventy-and-six days the harvest of wheat and barley would be yellow to the scythe and ripe for the granary, but the locust would cover the face of the earth, and there would be no grain to gather. The scythe would be idle, the granaries would be empty, the tillers of the ground would come hungry into the markets, and they themselves that were town-dwellers and tradesmen would be peris.h.i.+ng for bread, both they and their children with them.

Thus in Israel's absence, while he was away at Shawan, the three-and-twenty judges of the new Synhedrin of Tetuan had--contrary to Jewish custom--tried and convicted him. G.o.d would not let them perish for this man's life, and neither would He charge them with his blood.

Nevertheless, judges though they were, they could not kill him. They could only appeal against him to the Kaid. And what could they say? That the Lord had sent this plague of locusts in punishment of Israel's sin?

Ben Aboo would laugh in their faces and answer them, ”It is written.”

That to appease G.o.d's wrath it was expedient that this Jew should die?

Convince the Muslim that a Jew had brought this desolation upon the land of the Shereefs, and he would arise, and his soldiers with him, and the whole community of the Jewish people would be destroyed.

The judges had laid their heads together. It was idle to appeal to Ben Aboo against Israel on any ground of belief. Nay, it was more than idle, for it was dangerous. There was nothing in common between his faith and their own. His G.o.d was not their G.o.d, save in name only. The one was Allah, great, stern, relentless, inexorable, not to be moved striding on to an inevitable end, heedless of man and trampling upon him--though sometimes mocked with the names of the Compa.s.sionate and the Merciful.

But the other was Jehovah, the father of His people Israel, caring for them, upholding them, guiding the world for them, conquering for them; but visiting His anger upon them when they fell away from Him.

The three-and-twenty judges in session in the synagogue up the narrow lane of the Sok el Foki had sat far into the night, with the light of the oil-lamps gleaming on their perplexed and ashen faces. Some other ground of appeal against Israel had to be found, and they could not find it. At length they had remembered that, by ancient law and custom the trial of an Israelite, for life or death, must end an hour after sunset.

Also they had been reminded that the day that heard the evidence in a capital case must not be the same whereon the verdict was p.r.o.nounced. So they had broken up and returned home. And, going out at the gate, they had told the crowds that waited there that judgment had fallen upon Israel ben Oliel, but that his doom could not be made known until sunset on the following day.

That time was now come. In eagerness and impatience, in hot blood and anger, the people had gathered in the Sok three hours after midday. The Judges had rea.s.sembled in the synagogue in the early morning. They had not broken bread since yesterday, for the day that condemned a son of Israel to death must be a fast-day to his judges.

As the afternoon wore on, the doors of the synagogue were thrown open.

The sentence was not ready yet, but the judges in council were near to their decision. At the open door the reader of the synagogue had stationed himself, holding a flag in his hand. Under the gate of the Mellah a second messenger was standing, so placed that he could see the movement of the flag. If the flag fell, the sentence would be ”death,”

and the man under the gate would carry the tidings to the people gathered in the market-place. Then the three-and-twenty judges would come in procession and tell what steps had been taken that the doom p.r.o.nounced might be carried into effect.

Amid all their loud uproar, and notwithstanding the wild anger which seemed to consume them, the people turned at intervals of a few minutes to glance back towards the Mellah gate.

If the angels were looking down, surely it was a pitiful sight--these children of Zion in a strange land, where they were held as dogs and vermin and human scavengers to the Muslim; thinking and speaking and acting as their fathers had done any time for five thousand years before; again judging it expedient that one man should die rather than the whole people be brought to destruction; again probing their crafty heads, if not their hearts, for an artifice whereby their scapegoat might be killed by the hand of their enemy; children indeed, for all that some of their heads were bald, and some of their beards were grizzled, and some of their faces were wrinkled and hard and fierce; little children of G.o.d writhing in the grip of their great trouble.

Such was the scene to which Naomi had come, and such had been the doings of the town since the hour when her father left her. What hand had led her? What power had taught her? Was it merely that her far-reaching ears had heard the tumult? Had some unknown sense, groping in darkness, filled her with a vague terror, too indefinite to be called a thought, of great and impending evil? Or was it some other influence, some higher leading? Was it that the Lord was in His heaven that night as always, and that when the two black bondwomen in their helpless fear were following the blind maiden through the darkening streets she in her turn was following G.o.d?

When Fatimah and Habeebah saw what it was to which Naomi had led them, though they were sorely concerned at it, yet they were relieved as well, and put by the worst of the fears with which her strange behaviour had infected them. And remembering that she was the daughter of Israel, and they were his servants, and neither thinking themselves safe from danger if they stayed any longer where his name was bandied about as a reproach, nor fully knowing how many of the curses that were heaped upon him found a way to Naomi's mind, they were for turning again and going back to the house.

”Come,” said Habeebah; ”let us go--we are not safe.”

”Yes,” said Fatimah; ”let us take the poor child back.”

”Come along, then,” said Habeebah, and she laid hold of Naomi's hand.

”Naomi, Naomi,” whispered Fatimah in the girl's ear, ”we are going home.

Come, dearest, come.”

But Naomi was not to be moved. No gentle voice availed to stir her.

She stood where she had placed herself on the outskirts of the crowd, motionless save for her heaving bosom and trembling limbs, and silent save for her loud breathing and the low muttering of her pale lips, yet listening eagerly with her neck outstretched.

And if, as she listened, any human eye could have looked in on her dumb and imprisoned soul, the tumult it would have seen must have been terrible. For, though no one knew it as a certainty, yet in her darkness and muteness since the coming of her gift of hearing she had been learning speech and the different voices of men. All that was spoken in that crowd she understood, and never a word escaped her, and what others saw she felt, only nearer and more terrible, because wrapped in the darkness outside her eyes that were blind.

First there came a lull in the general clamour, and then a coa.r.s.e, jarring, stridulous voice rose in the air. Naomi knew whose voice it was--it was the voice of old Abraham Pigman, the usurer.